Maybe change some things, but not very many.

I’m hoping for pilot uniforms. And yes to the other poster, that WOULD mean putting the women in slacks.

The trick is to update the tech and keep the style.

It’s like complaining that a Broadway producer can’t mount The Sound of Music without the full original cast from 1959. Wouldn’t it be just a tad incongruous to haul 64-year-old Lauri Peters out of retirement to sing “I Am Sixteen, You Are Seventeen?”

And like all popular Broadway shows and Hollywood classics, they undergo rethinks, revivals, and remakes, often with some updates — changing a reference that a contemporary audience wouldn’t get here, updated costumes and sets there, all the way up to the “radical reinvention” end of the scale.

It’s a show about IMAGINARY future people zipping around space in velour jumpsuits and having adventures, with a good dose of liberal-humanist philosophy on the side.

Trek doesn’t belong to us: it’s a property of Paramount Pictures. They can do whatever they want with it, including painting the Enterprise candy-striped pink, and I just know there’s a certain kind of fanboy who will whine about it not being like the original show, but will still pay $20 to gorge on popcorn while watching it in the theatre on the first day.

I think the franchise is in good hands. The Abrams / Orci / etc/ team seem much more sensitive to the material than Berman and Braga ever were. They have fans inside the production at the highest levels, for heaven’s sake. But more importantly, they are people that understand how to make great dramatic action shows and movies.

I mean, Alias — was that show really about the Rambaldi-artifact-of-the-week or more about the constantly shifting dramatic tension between people who can’t trust anyone (Arvin Sloane, Sydney Bristow, Jack Bristow, etc) — the reason you watched week after week, aside from the thrills of seeing Jennifer Garner kick peoples’ butts, was Alias’ soap opera. And it was brilliant.

As to the look-and-feel issue — I have technology sitting on my desk that makes anything seen in the original series’ run look like the sets of Flash Gordon serials, aka Captain Proton. People now have TVs at home that are bigger than the bridge viewscreen. We have iPhones and Bluetooth headsets much smaller than Uhura’s salt-shaker-in-the-ear. We deal with ever-shifting user interfaces that don’t require a fixed button layout.

I’m sure they will extrapolate the “Trek design language” — colour palettes, shapes, materials — from TOS, but you can’t seriously expect the cardboard and Lite-Brite sets of the past to translate to an IMAX screen. It has to be updated. Subtly, sensitively, but it has to look believable and cool to an audience of non-Trekkies.

Enterprise NX-01 was a believable extrapolation of ‘what interfaces might look like in 2154, knowing what we know now’, with none-too-subtle hints and references to the TOS Enterprise’s designs and graphics. Extrapolate another hundred years on from that and I don’t think you get gumdrop lights. mechanical dials and physical switches. Unless we want to go in some sort of steampunk direction…

Agreed. In spades.

“Star Trek XIX: You Kids Get Off My G*DD*#@ Lawn!”

(sorry. couldn’t resist, although I should have.)

Peace. Live Long and Prosper.
The Vulcanista }:-|